Today we will have a tour down history of one of the greatest countries in the historical time - one that was refered to as the “cradle of civilization” - Iraq
Hello! and welcome to the second blog post of “New things per day” series. In this blog post, we will get to know another Middle East country - Iraq. Some of you may have heard of the country, could be of either good or not so good things. Today we will try to explore the country judment - free and in a pair of fresh eyes. Also, we will be using a new package today - the “leaftime” which served as a really nice add - ons to the “leaflet” package and allow you to automate you leaflet map. All credit go to the creator timelyportfolio for his amazing creation.
Let’s get started!
Irad used to be regarded as the “cradle of civilization” of the Middle Ages. The country is a home to many heritage and historic sites, originating back from the golden time of the Ottoman regime. Some of the cultural heritage we may have heard of would include the Hanging garden in Babylon, the Erbil Citadel, the Samarra Archaeological City….
Figure 1: The Citadel of Ebril
However, looking at the country now, all we see is a turbulence of time of wars, fightings and violences. Hundreds of Iraq people fled the country to run away from the terrorists, people died and lost their homes amid the bombing.
In the next section, i will try to recap some of the highlights of the Iraq’s contemporary current situation based on the choronological order. I handpicked only events that i believed directly led to the current state of Iraq. Before I start, i want you to answer this question yourself: “How do you make of Iraq? Is it a poor country torned by wars with high children mortality rate, poor facility, high iliteracy rate and ect..”. Please keep your answer in mind and proceed.
The story of Iraq dated back in the 18s when the Ottoman Empired collapsed and Britain took over control of the country. From that moment, a series of religion, ethnicity and power conflicts happened non - stop that derived the country far away from being the “cradle of civilization” that it once was.
Kurdistan is a non-governmental region and one of the largest stateless nations in the world. Kurdistan positioned in the north of Iraq. The region was a product of conflicts between several of countries and the Kurds to claim control over the territory. Up until today, conflicts between the Government and the Kurds- supported activist groups still occur, and most of them involved the use of gunfires and violence.
Portions of the region are recognized by two countries: Iran, where the province of Kordestan lies; and northern Iraq, site of the autonomous region known as Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) or Iraqi Kurdistan. The people populated this area are the Kurds, who were mostly nomandics before the break down of the Ottoman Empire.
As of today, Iraq is still torned by many terrorists activities. The Central Intelligence agency (CIA) of America has pointed out that the country currently hosts 5 home- based terrorist groups and 2 foreign - based terrorist groups, one of which you might have heard a lot in the media - the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS). With the
The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) of the United States has tried to put together all of the political violence events and some relevant non - relevant events happened everyday around the world. I obtained a list for Iraq from their database, which can be downloaded here, for the period of 2016 - the most recently of 2020. Using this dataset, i tried to visualise the spread of the terrorist attacks in the territory of Iraq, showing how the country have suffered from the acts for terrorism.
First we have a look at the dataset provided by the ACLED:
Rows: 21,511
Columns: 34
$ data_id <int> 7191666, 7191247, 7191248, 7191813, 719155…
$ iso <int> 368, 368, 368, 368, 368, 368, 368, 368, 36…
$ event_id_cnty <fct> IRQ26318, IRQ26313, IRQ26316, IRQ26305, IR…
$ event_id_no_cnty <int> 26318, 26313, 26316, 26305, 26308, 26301, …
$ start <date> 2020-09-05, 2020-09-05, 2020-09-05, 2020-…
$ end <date> 2020-09-07, 2020-09-07, 2020-09-07, 2020-…
$ year <int> 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, …
$ time_precision <int> 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, …
$ event_type <fct> Battles, Explosions/Remote violence, Battl…
$ sub_event_type <fct> Armed clash, Remote explosive/landmine/IED…
$ actor1 <fct> Police Forces of Iraq (2020-) Iraqi Nation…
$ assoc_actor_1 <fct> , , Private Security Forces (Iraq), , , , …
$ inter1 <int> 1, 3, 1, 8, 1, 1, 1, 8, 4, 4, 8, 1, 8, 2, …
$ actor2 <fct> Unidentified Armed Group (Iraq), Civilians…
$ assoc_actor_2 <fct> , Military Forces of the United States (20…
$ inter2 <int> 3, 7, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 0, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 7, …
$ interaction <int> 13, 37, 12, 28, 12, 12, 12, 80, 24, 44, 28…
$ region <fct> Middle East, Middle East, Middle East, Mid…
$ country <fct> Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, …
$ admin1 <fct> Thi-Qar, Baghdad, Diyala, Erbil, Sala al-D…
$ admin2 <fct> Rifai, Kadhimiya, Khanaqin, Mergasur, Sama…
$ admin3 <lgl> NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA, NA…
$ location <fct> Rifai, Baghdad - Kadhimiya, Qaryat Al Qala…
$ latitude <dbl> 31.7213, 33.3805, 34.3671, 36.8431, 34.195…
$ longitude <dbl> 46.1102, 44.3462, 45.2447, 44.3009, 43.885…
$ geo_precision <int> 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1, 2, …
$ source <fct> Al Sumaria TV, Al Sumaria TV; Yaqein, Nati…
$ source_scale <fct> National, National, National, Other, Natio…
$ notes <fct> "On 5 September 2020, Iraqi Intelligence f…
$ fatalities <int> 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 0, 1, …
$ timestamp <int> 1599528935, 1599528934, 1599528934, 159952…
$ iso3 <fct> IRQ, IRQ, IRQ, IRQ, IRQ, IRQ, IRQ, IRQ, IR…
$ group <chr> "non-IS", "non-IS", "IS", "non-IS", "IS", …
$ color <chr> "blue", "blue", "red", "blue", "red", "red…
ACLED divided the event types into three major groups: Violent events, Demonstrations (which includes protests and riots) and Non - violent actions. A total of 26,235 events were recorded from 2016 to 2020. For the purpose of this section, i filtered only the Violent events to get 21,511 events fitting into the category, which made up a whooping c.82% of total events recorded!
I only used some of the variables featured in the dataset for this section. Also i created some more to facilitate my construction of the map, they are:
Next up, we look at the animated map of all violence events that took place in Iraq from 2016 to 2020:
OGR data source with driver: ESRI Shapefile
Source: "/Users/HanseMac/Desktop/Monash/ETC5523_Communicating_with_data/Blog_entry/my-blog-HanseNgo305/Blog_entry_1/_posts/iraq_situation/IRQ_adm0.shp", layer: "IRQ_adm0"
with 1 features
It has 70 fields
Integer64 fields read as strings: ID_0 OBJECTID_1